Going from Shadow to Sunlight

Looking back on the past year, in the midst of such fear, uncertainty, and worry around pandemic disease, war, and political and social unrest, I can say that in spite of all those unsettling factors, I have almost ironically grown to feel like some of my old, personal internal baggage has become lighter, almost vapourous, and some very old shadows have almost faded away.

I’m talking, in colorful terms, about the baggage of my youth: my past family experiences and my strained relationships with my parents.

So far, in my True Life writing project, I’ve dredged up a lot of old memories and revisited many one-sided assumptions. I may still regret many of my parents’ life choices, but I’ve also learned to celebrate their successes and to appreciate them. My mother and father were not just tragic people with burdens and failures. They were each full but flawed, and each worthy of compassion and understanding.

Maybe at the age of 56, I’ve finally grown enough distance from them and gathered enough of an older person’s perspective in my life that I’ve released a lot of my lingering sorrow, hatred, and resentment for how their mistakes affected me and my sister. Maybe the mass and individual tragedies in the world in the past few years has finally convinced me of life’s finiteness, and made my problems seem smaller and more ordinary. Maybe I’ve finally reached a “life’s too short” resolution.

Deaths of family and friends has probably been another major factor contributing to my letting go of baggage:

In 2018, we lost our brother Victor to cancer. In 2019, we lost our beloved little cat Peaches to a mysterious cancer-like tumour. In 2021, we lost my wife’s father to complications from Covid.

Watching an old friend’s family suffer the devastating loss of their mother and their son, I saw how the grief and pain drew them all closer, and made them even more devoted to each other. Last month, one of my wife’s dearest friends passed away from cancer too, and we watched her family’s love coalesce and crystalize in the same way.

It’s felt like step after step of loss, from one person to another, all of them reminding me that living must come to an end for each of us some day. Often, a recent loss will evoke a memory of an earlier one, tangling and compounding the grief.

At some point back in my youth, I believed in life as a kind of infinite horizon that offered me as much room as I could take. I felt it was up to me to keep running towards that bright light. Now, it’s an end-point, not a magnetic goal to run towards. It’s more like a wall. I feel as if I can see the wall that I must one day breach, and it’s getting gradually closer. I wonder how long I’ll live, and how healthy or happy I’ll be while I’m doing it.

The challenge is in accepting this truth:

While my life’s horizon no longer feels infinite, once I get over that last wall, everything I am will be.